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Just like Pokémon and Tamagotchi, Neopets rode a wave of interest in virtual pets in the late 1990s and 2000s, particularly among children.
The game originally launched on November 15, 1999, and quickly became one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 25 million users at its peak.
Its following has dwindled in the years since its prime, and it has been plagued by bugs due to underfunding.
Now, a team of developers is promising a ‘new era’ for Neopets, with $4 million of funding from various investors to ‘to breathe fresh life’ into the game.
A revamped version of the site is relaunching tomorrow, followed by more than 50 ‘revived’ games on July 25.
Just like Pokémon and Tamagotchi , Neopets rode a wave of interest in virtual pets in the late 1990s and 2000s, particularly among children. The game originally launched on November 15, 1999, and quickly became one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 25 million users at its peak
What is Neopets?
A customisable ‘Neohome’ which allows players to build a home for their pets
Neopets is a virtual pet website that launched back in 1999.
It takes place in the fictional world, Neopia, where players adopt and care for their Neopets and play mini-games to earn currency.
It peaked in popularity in the early 2000s, but has maintained a small but steady following in more recent years.
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Neopets is now owned by an independent company called World of Neopia Inc, having been part of Nickelodeon during its heyday.
‘The Neopets team is, for the first time in over a decade, equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance,’ a blog post says.
‘Funding raised from our management team and external investors will allow us to revive the brand as a whole.
‘We have a fresh round of investment and funding from the management buyout that will help us repair many of the community’s biggest concerns, such as broken games, unconverted pages and bigs.’
Neopets was devised in 1997 by Adam Powell, a Welsh computer programmer, in the year the Tamagotchi craze took over the world.
The Neopets website launched in November 1999 and by the following month it was registering 600,000 page views daily.
The site let users create their own Neopets, which could be customised as different species with different colours and outfits.
Users could also feed, bathe, and play with their Neopets, and even take them to the doctor if they got sick.
The site even let fans message other users by sending them a ‘NetMail’, in a precursor of what Facebook and Twitter would offer in the following decades.
The Neopets website was launched in November 1999 and by the following month it was registering 600,000 page views daily. Pictured, a staff member at the Neopets headquarters in Glendale, California
The site let users create their own Neopets, which could be customised as different species with different colours and outfits
READ MORE: Neopets comes to smartphones
More than a decade after its popularity peaked, Neopets went mobile
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Although it was praised for being educational, Neopets courted controversy for exposing children to heavy advertising and triggering in-game spending.
One of the virtual currencies in the game, Neocash, had to either be purchased with real-world money or won by chance in-game.
After two years of the Neopets website, a consortium of investors bought a controlling interest in Neopets and in 2005 it was purchased by Viacom, the company that owns Nickelodeon.
By the mid noughties, Neopets was registering a peak of 25 million users, around 500,000 of whom were children under the age of eight.
The Neopets downfall was triggered in March 2014 when it was sold to a California firm called JumpStart Games, which three years later was acquired by Chinese company NetDragon.
By 2017, the Neopets userbase had fallen to just 100,000 daily users, JumpStart Games CEO at the time told Kotaku.
Staff tried to regenerate interest in the brand by launching a spin-off app in 2019, bringing it to smartphones for the first time.
In a worrying moment for the passionate Neopets fan community, Jumpstart Games was closed down by NetDragon at the end of last month.
Neopets rode a wave of interest in virtual pets in the late 1990s and 2000s, triggered by the Tamagotchi (pictured)
However, following a management buyout deal negotiated by fan Dominic Law, Neopets is now an independent company and free from ‘corporate baggage’.
A revamped and ‘unified’ Neopets website launching Thursday will ‘serve as a one stop shop’ for brand announcements, links to games and products, a repository of Neopets articles and related links and more.
‘The newly united Neopets team has now been entrusted with the decision-making and overall brand strategy of Neopets, enabling them to work solely on the betterment of the entire Neopets game and community,’ the post says.
Staff also plan to make Neopets compatible with mobile phone browsers, although initially its focus will be on desktop, much like before.
Despite pioneering digital currencies, the new project will ‘not be crypto-focused’, however, and will not integrate crypto or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk
